


The Dominant Line Between Life and Death

by ladyflowdi



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Child Death, Episode: s01e04 Cyberwoman, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Episode: s01e04 Cyberwoman, Self Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-16
Updated: 2010-01-16
Packaged: 2017-12-24 14:05:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/940856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyflowdi/pseuds/ladyflowdi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the space of a heartbeat, between the rhythmic pulse of life itself, Ianto’s world is split in two. There is only the Before and the After, the Once Was and Is Now, as if someone has cut him right down the middle, a perfect sagittal seam that has equal parts guts, eyes, and heart.  He is coexisting with himself, and the other Ianto won’t stop screaming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dominant Line Between Life and Death

**Author's Note:**

> This is a dark, DARK fic. You are warned. Part of my LJ-to-AO3 project.

In the space of a heartbeat, between the rhythmic pulse of life itself, Ianto’s world is split in two. There is only the Before and the After, the Once Was and Is Now, as if someone has cut him right down the middle, a perfect sagittal seam that has equal parts guts, eyes, and heart. He is coexisting with himself, and the other Ianto won’t stop screaming.

He saves her. The ‘how’ is not important, less because his actions were meaningless but more because Ianto doesn’t remember. It’s a blur, the fire and blood, the mechanical creaks and cranks of demons from hell walking among them. She sobs his name and he saves her because there is no choice in the matter, even when the other Ianto jibbers with terror because Christ God, he can see the yellow parchment of her bones, the fleshy string of tattered ligaments, the twisted nightmare of rippled muscle tissue torn from the bone. She is flayed open with scalpel precision and she is screaming for him to end her agony. 

He saves her, hides her, and stitches her wounds closed, ugly black lines edging around the metal that has replaced life. He tends to her fever when she rots from the inside, steals drugs to ease her pain when the rift between human and machine becomes too much, as if she’s riding the edge of a knife and every false move is a dance with death. 

His first mistake, though he can’t fault himself his logic, is to hide her away for two terrifying days and go to Cardiff. He’d thought Jack Harkness, who flouted all of Torchwood’s rules, who took the people who came through the rift to his little island instead of putting a bullet in their brains, who _saved_ people when there was no hope left, could help them. Jack Harkness, who loved people with all his heart, had simply not loved Ianto enough.

And yet all of that, the horror of the past eight months, seems like a long-distant memory, a story told to him by a favored uncle who enjoyed a good scary story about beasts and monsters that went bump in the night. Fantastic, robots and dashing 1940’s pilot heroes and the bad guy in the suit hell-bent on building a robot army and taking over the world. 

Instead, Ianto is transported back to those rainy Saturday evenings with his father at the Royal Opera House. They’d catch the train early in the afternoon, mam’s Sunday stew warm in their bellies, from Cardiff all the way to London. Ianto loved those train rides most of all, not for the little old ladies who pinched his cheeks or ruffled his hair, or the biscuits from the sweets trolley, or even for the porter who came round to stamp their tickets, but because he got to sit next to his father and listen to him tell stories. Stories about the wars, about his granddad who’d been with the Queen’s Navy and who Ianto was named after, about his grandma who had grown up in Italy and fallen in love with her sailor beau even though they’d barely understood one another. Romantic stories, dashing stories, stories about love and friendship and courage, those were the tales his father told him on those long, cherished train rides into London. If he closes his eyes he can almost feel the crinkly blue suit soft against his skin, and the too-tight shinys squishing his toes. 

It all seems so far away now, sitting on his sofa and watching the sun come and go, light beams full of dust motes dancing to their own tune. He listens to cars pass, horns honking, and to people walking on the street. A baby cries, and down the road a construction crew is replacing a fire hydrant that has steadily leaked for months, often times wetting his shoes and the hem of his pants on his way to work. The rough sound of chisel and concrete is gratingly loud on the ears.

Ianto sits and watches the shadows of birds pass under a cresting sun, casting long-winged smudges over his walls. Where once he would have thought of angels, now all he can imagine are winged monsters, sphinxes ready to tear his eyes out. He sits and listens to his phone ring, over the crickets and the far-away police siren and the quiet shuffling of the earth settling in under the moon. 

They are coming for him. He knows Gwen brought him home simply to await judgment, that this is only a reprieve. It is fitting, a tidy end to this nightmare, and as Ianto sits on his sofa and listens to the SUV pull up outside, he isn’t scared. He’s so tired.

The door thumps, and Ianto looks up at it, and Jack says, “Ianto?” through the thick, heavy wood. Muffled though it is Ianto can hear anger born out of frustration, and something in him tries its best to take him over, to poke a tiny hole inside of him, like a crack in a water glass. 

A jingle of metal, a key in his lock, and suddenly Jack is there, larger than Ianto’s flat can hope to contain, big blue coat and big blue eyes.

“Ianto,” Jack says again. His boots, enormous clumping tan affairs with enough tread that they’d comfortably take him across the continent, are almost silent on Ianto’s wooden floors, floors that haven’t had the proper love and attention given to them. How those boots are so quiet on the ancient wood is anyone’s guess, as Jack always did seem to have special powers when it came on sneaking up on people. Those boots are a reflection of that personality, probably alien boots for all Ianto knows, and suddenly so much closer than Ianto can handle right now.

Jack crouches down in front of him, puts a hand on Ianto’s knee, Ianto’s knee dark and crusted with all sorts of things, life things, soiled beyond rescue, the trousers of the suit that his father made for him when Ianto had gone to university. No hope for them now. 

“Ianto?” Jack says again, and then looks behind him where Owen stands, uncomfortable and statue-still in Ianto’s doorway, his big black bag in his hand like the country doctor come to see to the new foal. 

Jack touches his hand, Ianto’s hand lying by his thigh on his sofa, stiff and dark and stained. The fibers of the sofa are warm under his fingers, almost hot, and the skin of his palm burns. 

Owen, then, too close, but Ianto can’t shift, can’t move when Jack gives Owen Ianto’s hand, rough and scraped and scabbed over. The lamp comes on, gold in his eyes and burning. Owen’s fingers are cool, almost cold as they turns Ianto’s palm over, as they poke and touch and stand in the way of the evening light on Ianto’s wall. He casts an enormous shadow, a giant, fee-fi-fo-fum, but worse than that, so much worse, because he’s never felt like a giant to Ianto before.

“I tried to call,” Jack says, and there is hardness in his eyes, hardness that Ianto knows must have been so simple to conjure up, reflecting disappointment and anger and sorrow. He picks up Ianto’s phone from the sofa table. The screen reads 13 MISSED CALLS. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

There is no answer to that. Jack stands with a rustle, loud in the quiet of the evening time hours, and with an ease Ianto has never been able to manage, pulls him to his feet. Ianto feels the weight on his toes, inside his damp shoes, along his legs and neck and back, but he can’t hold it. 

He is lifted when his legs buckle – Jack’s strong arm under his knees, the wool of his coat warm and rough against Ianto’s cheek – and carried to his bedroom like some macabre maiden whisked off her feet. He doesn’t think about what will happen after Jack sits him on the end of his bed. Doesn’t think about the calm, efficient way he is stripped of his clothing, of the suit his father had made him, a destroyed mess on the floor. He’d worn it as armor to bolster his courage in the dangerous game he’d been playing, a game that been an end to all things he thought he knew. His father had made him that suit, had taught Ianto about hems and inseams and the proper cut of a jacket for slender men, especially beanpoles like Ianto, so that one day when he was gone he would always have a good suit, just in case. 

Jack slips Ianto’s socks from his feet, cotton dry and crackling and red, and his watch, the match for the silver cufflinks, from his wrist. The skin at his wrist has grown smooth from the years of wearing that watch, soft, sensitive when Jack’s thumb moves over it. “We’re going to get you cleaned up,” Jack says, and Ianto looks up at him, into those old eyes, and understands. It’s easier, in the end, once a body was dumped. Wasn’t like it was before, in the old days – now there were forensics, and the last thing any of them needed was a trail leading back to Torchwood. 

It had always been Ianto’s job to clean the body, cut the nails, scrub the skin.

“Oy,” Owen says from the doorway to Ianto’s washroom, where the shower is running. He has rolled up his sleeves, his strangely shaped face, so often full of animation and emotion, closed off as if he’s closed a door. “No use explaining, Jack. Come on, then.”

They stare at each other for a lifetime, two, three with Ianto naked and cold on his bed, until Jack nods and looks back at Ianto. “Think you can stand?” And then – “Never mind,” and he lifts Ianto again easily, so easily. “You’re too thin, Ianto.”

His father had so often said the same thing, the product of a lifetime running wild, purposeless and lost. They pass the suit, lying dead and forgotten on the floor. Soiled beyond rescue.

Ianto watches them pass in the mirror, Jack, arms and shoulders straining. They step into the shower and Jack sets him down on feet that won’t hold him, except Owen is there too, host of the party in Ianto’s loo.

Hot water pours down his body, his hair and his face and his elbows and his ribs, his lips and his earlobes and his eyelashes. Down, down between his small toes, pink water and black shoes and Owen, looking at him and saying, “Alright then, Jonesy,” easy and firm as if they have always been mates, close enough for Owen to do this for him.

Jack holds him and Owen washes him, cloth rough on Ianto’s skin. His arms and fingers and belly and legs, harsh scrubs at his skin and his nails and his neck. “Close your eyes,” Owen says, and soap runs down Ianto’s cheeks, over his lips, until that’s all there is, water and soap and Owen’s hands on his body, Jack’s weight against his, holding him up like a plastic bag caught in a gust of wind and pressed flat against a concrete wall. Unshakable, unmovable, only Jack’s arms came around him again and the water shut off and there is warmth, warmth on his face and his arms and his back.

Ianto says, “We would have had a baby.”

Owen freezes, and Jack says, “I know, Ianto.”

“When they took her.”

Jack says, “I know,” and wraps him in Ianto’s warm blue robe, thick and heavy and warm to ease the chill of Welsh winter. He’s always been a slender man. 

Owen looks at him with his eyes filled red, and Ianto says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right now,” Owen says, and Ianto thought maybe it was, if only for a moment.

Jack helps him to his bed, and Ianto sits and listens to the water drip-drop from the washcloth hanging on the shower faucet, and to the sounds of Owen and Jack breathing, and lets Jack lay him down, tuck him in. A suicide, then, or a break-in. A bullet between his eyes here in the comfort of his bed, maybe after he’s gone to sleep, and it’s a kindness that they’re doing him, Ianto knows, a _kindness_ because in London they only took you into the basement and disposed of you with efficiency and nothing like humanity.

Later, Ianto will wake to the birds outside his window, to the traffic and the construction crew and the women down in the shop. He will wake to Jack overwhelming his flat, every crevice and corner, as if he were the sun realized and the rays of his light were enough to fill the whole world. He will wake and will have no idea why he isn’t dead, and think that there was a measure of compassion to Torchwood London after all.

Ianto will get up to take a piss. When he is done, he will wash his hands and look at his reflection out of the corner of his eye, pasty and skinny, face dark with stubble.

It is then, chin itching and eyes dry, that he will notice his razor is missing. It is then that he will notice the contents of his medicine cabinet too are gone, as are the butcher knives his sister bought him years ago as a flat warming gift and the .45 he keeps hidden in the lint trap. Ianto will notice all of this and stand in the middle of his flat and laugh, laugh and laugh until it doesn’t sound like laughter anymore and his mouth is filled with the iron-copper bitterness of blood.

But for now, just for this moment, with the sun hours from rising and the heater ticking in the corner of the room, Ianto is in his bed, too tired to notice Jack’s fingers in his hair.


End file.
